Book List 2010

My applications for grad school in the US are all but finished, although I haven't yet decided where to apply within the UK. Despite the general air of panic following me these past few weeks, actually, everything is fine, and it's a relief to be on the other side.

In 2010 I decided to record the books I read:

	Title:	Author:
1	Storia Greca	Bettalli, Marco
2	The Western Way of War	Davis Hanson, Victor
3	La forza e l'astuzia - I Greci, I Persiani e la battaglia di Salamina	Strauss, Barry
4	Pride and Prejudice	Austen, Jane
5	The Stuff of Thought*	Pinker, Steven
6	Uomini che odiano le donne	Larrson, Stieg
7	Una storia della lingua latina*	Poccetti, Poli & Santini
8	La teoria dei colori/The Theory of Colours*	Goethe, Johann
9	Il deserto dei Tartari*	Buzzati, Dino
10	Sessanta racconti*	Buzzati, Dino
11	The Human Stain	Roth, Philip
12	The Good Soldier Svejk*	Hasek, Jaroslav
13	What’s Bred in the Bone	Davies, Robertson
14	Blind	Saramago, Josè
15	The Sheltering Sky	Bowles, Paul
16	The Shadow of the Wind	Ruiz Zafón, Carlos
17	We Need To Talk About Kevin	Shriver, Lionel
18	La ragazza che giocava con il fuoco	Larrson, Stieg
19	Polinnia	Assort.
20	Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry	Otis, Brooks
21	Apology of Socrates	Plato
22	The Almost Moon	Sebold, Alice
23	Death and the Penguin	Kurkov, Andrey
24	The Early History of Rome	Livy
25	Language and Reality	Devitt & Sterelny
26	Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore*	Calvino, Italo
27	The Voyage of the Argo	Apollonius of Rhodes
28	Daphnis and Chloe	Longus
29	La regina dei castelli di carta	Larrson, Stieg
30	Did the Greeks believe in their Myths?	Veyne, Paul
31	Seven days in New Crete	Graves, Robert
32	The Iliad*	Homer/Lattimore
33	A Country Doctor’s Notebook	Bulgakov, Mikhail
34	Frost in May	White, Antonia
35	The Kindly Ones*	Littell, Jonathan
36	The Last Dragonslayer	Fforde, Jasper
37	Goodbye to All That	Graves, Robert
38	The Gulag Archipelago*	Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr
39	Lolita	Nabokov, Vladimir
40	Doctor on Everest	Kamler, Kenneth
41	Her Fearful Symmetry*	Niffenegger, Audrey
42	Juliet*	Fortier, Anne

*unfinished..

It's nice to be able to review the year in books; it recalls where you were and what you were thinking when you read each one. The amount of stars are a shame, but I'll get back to them.

Of the 42, I'd already read The Early Days of Rome, The Iliad, Frost in May and What's Bred in the Bone. The book I'm least likely to ever finish is Una Storia della Lingua Latina, closely followed by Her Fearful Symmetry. I was given a copy for Christmas, but I'm already offended by its working of the creepy twin motif. The main - or indeed only - characteristics of FOUR characters is that they are a.) an identical twin, and b.) immensely troubled by it. Did I mention I'm an identical twin?

The book I enjoyed the most was probably Death and the Penguin. It's a charmingly surreal story about an obituary writer, his penguin (rescued from Kiev zoo) and their escape from organised crime. I also liked A Country Doctor's Notebook, which is a series of semi-autobiographical anecdotes from Bulgakov's time practising medicine in rural Russia. A lot of the stories deal with his fear and sense of responsibility - he had only just graduated from medical school and had very little experience. He also has to fight off wolves in the snow.

Stieg Larsson's trilogy was a lot of fun: I bought the first book in January as a challenge to myself. I'd been feeling down about my progress in Italian - I think languages are infuriating; everything you learn becomes ridiculously self-evident whereas your failings are always immediately obvious. So I bought this book - I could read the first page - and I told myself to sit down and read it. When I'd finished, I thought, I could complain.

It started out very slowly. I read ten pages at a time, stalling on unfamiliar words or expressions - but then something happened - it stopped giving me a headache, or being a chore - and I started really enjoying it. I wasn't thinking about English, or worrying about the words I didn't know. I just read and read and read. I stalled a little on the second - the first 100 pages detailing Lisbeth's breast enlargement and Mikael's sexual prowess were both redundant and painful. Once the plot got going, it was interesting enough. I had to stop and roll my eyes every so often, but my compliments go to Larsson: his books are perfect for reading in a second language. Everything is explicit, the writing is straightforward and they're page turners. I was a little sad when I finished the final book: they really marked a strange kind of private journey. All 2000 pages of it.

The final book - Juliet - was another Christmas present. It's set in Siena, which is fun. What's not so fun is the trope about the American girl who returns to her 'homeland' and finds long-lost relatives welcoming her back into the fold and telling her she has her mother eyes, etc. She's also searching for buried treasure, is somehow Juliet Capulet reincarnate and has twin issues. As I said, I'm not a fan of the twin issues.

The first book on the list has a strange place in my heart: it was a manual for my Greek History class, and I spent hours and hours poring over it, memorising dates and figures. Greek History was one of the classes I enjoyed the most in Italy, and I later asked Prof. Bettalli - who wrote the book - to write me a reference for grad school. I received an email from him this morning, lending a strange kind of circularity to the year.

So - happy new year to all! What were your favourite books of 2010?